Sunday, 12 September 2010

His concept describes how the human body is increasingly becoming a site of technology which implies: “an emptying out, a deterritorialisation, conducted in conjunction with a technoscientific reterritorialisation which disrupts and fractalises human and social totalities, which Virilio insists should remain whole,” - see http://tinyurl.com/32k7gak - here endocolonisation is adopted as a concept by a ‘cyborg anthropology’ scholar.

Medicine formed one of the first areas of study for cyborg anthropology, which considered subjects such as reproductive technology and genetics. More recently issues such as privacy, identity and connectivity have come to the fore in connection with other technologies that blur the boundaries between machine and human. Endocolonisation by microchips links this more recent work to medicine once again.

This presentation by Amber Case is a good summary of the kinds of issues cyborg anthropologists are considering now:

Saturday, 14 August 2010

New fangled approaches in healthcare will always get some peoples’ backs up and the idea of a virtual medic is about as new fangled as it gets: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/190756/Web-Would-you-trust-a-virtual-medic- Both patients and practitioners (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10285950) and somewhat inevitably insurance companies with competing premium member services have raised objections to mediated interactions where the purpose is diagnosis or advice. Nevertheless, NHS Direct (a bit of a misnomer given its callcentre and website operations essentially mediate the healthcare experience) has proven enormously popular in England – with 18 million visits to its website in 2009 and 5 million calls to its call centre.

Anecdotally, some of the strongest objections to the ‘re-mediation’ of healthcare come from Northern Ireland where NHS Direct isn’t available. The primary concern there isn’t necessarily about mediation, after all doctors there allocate time in the day to take phonecalls and even emails from patients, a situation also common in the US. It’s the idea that advice should be given by anonymous practitioners who have no idea of your medical history (moreover they are nurses, complain the doctors).

I have been speaking to some of those within the NHS who would like to get to the bottom of ‘resistance’ on the part of both patients and practitioners to more technology-enabled services. Many share a vision where interactions with health services ultimately become like interactions with banks: the 2020 Public Services Trust is doing some thinktank work on this front.

With the Northern Ireland example alone, it’s clear that a patchwork of values concerning healthcare exist and that’s before considering constituencies such as the poor where issues of access also come into play. Clearly, more work needs to be done to understand what lies behind those values and what the information needs and access issues of patients are. Ethnography can help on these fronts.